It Was a Dark and Stormy Night… (good grief!)

Our good friend from Steamboat Springs, Jeannie Berger, departed after a good long visit with us on Tuesday, February 20th. We had such fun with her initiating her to our sailing life with a few big crossings from St. Lucia through Guadeloupe, Martinique, les Saintes, and on into Antigua. The seas were quite high and we always had to sail double reefed to handle the continuing higher winds. She handled the rougher water like a trouper, never complaining, but surely wondering, at times, why we thought rough weather and tougher passages were “fun”. We arrived in Antigua safely after the roughest passage and settled into on of our favorite anchorages, Jolly Harbor. The wind continued to howl for several days but we made the best of it with some beach time, an excursion to St. Johns, the capital city, and a night up to Shirley Heights to hear the big steel pan orchestra (20+ players!) and to enjoy the big BBQ party there.

This is the steel Drum band, though it's when Ellie and the girls saw it, not when Jeannie saw it. Sadly, her time with us came to an end and we bid farewell as she taxied off to the airport for her flight back to the states on Tuesday. After an evening catching our breath, we set about prepping for our next guests, daughter Ellie and our two lovely grand daughters, AJ and Liv. Our youngest daughter Ellie and her two young girls (7 & 4) arrived on Wednesday at the St Johns airport. We made arrangements with a taxi driver to transport us to pick them up and we arrived in plenty of time to welcome them as they passed through the customs gates. We all came back to the bay by dinner time to Jolly Harbor and they got their first taste of boating by getting a wet dinghy ride out to the good ship A2C with the luggage and five people weighing it down. They laughed all the way out to the boat so I guess it was OK by them.

We grilled some chicken, allowed them to get settled in and then, after they had been traveling for two days, they crashed into their beds for the night. As the wind continued to howl, the boat was constantly straining on the anchor set and our double bridle and the motion of the boat in the waves was very rough. The girls all did well when outside the boat but had a bit of queasiness when down below. Since it was bedtime anyway, I advised them that laying in bed with their eyes closed was the easiest was to get through a rough patch and that seemed to work well for them. I also had advised the kids that there would be many odd and unfamiliar noises throughout the night but that they shouldn’t worry as those noises were just new sounds to them. Some would be waves against the sides of the boat, some might be from the rigging “singing”, while others could be from other boats in the area. They seemed to understood my explanation and settled in to try to get a good nights rest. The wind had not abated since before they had arrived and we were still at anchor experiencing ongoing wavy conditions with high wind chop from the 20-25 kt sustained winds. That night while sitting in the cockpit after the girls went to bed, we even turned on the wind gauge to see how big the gusting was and saw several times that it rose well above 30 kts.

By 9:30 that night, everyone was finally in bed and ready for a good rest. Although a rough, bumpy night, all seemed well until 4:30AM when a very loud crunching sound emanated from directly outside our bedroom window. Rudely awakened, we hurried to the deck to find that, as feared might happen, our anchor had slipped from it’s previous 6 day hold and had allowed us to bump into the boat anchored behind us. Rick jumped to the controls and quickly got the engines running, while Suz hurried to the fore to attend to the anchor chain. She was able to pull the anchor under some very rough conditions while Rick held our boat as steady as possible to allow the anchor to be lifted. We had tried so hard to maintain a quiet environment for the kids to sleep through the night and here we were, starting engines and banging into neighboring vessels. We re-anchored after moving back into the previous position and only then could we somewhat relax and watch the anchor continue to strain to perform its duty. During the anchor dragging “fire drill” Ellie had come up to see what was going on and we assured her that all was fine and apologized for the noise. She checked the girls and they were not concerned as they said they were just laying there in bed trying to imagine what each new different noise was. To be doubly safe, Rick decided to maintain a watch to be sure we didn’t drift again as everyone else settled back into bed to try to regain some sense of sleep pattern. The rest of the night went without incident and as dawn came, we noticed several other boats had experienced similar difficulties during the night. What a crazy welcome to the sailing life for Ellie, AJ and Liv! The next day, we thought the girls might need to get some beach time so Rick dinghied them all ashore and returned to the boat to stand watch again, as the wind and wave action had actually increased some since the previous night. While the ladies played on the beach, went to the market and did some simple sightseeing, Rick found his decision to stay aboard to be the right one. After about an hour alone on the boat, a call came in from a neighboring vessel announcing to Rick that from his perspective, there appeared to be some difficulty with our anchor bridles. He had not heard or felt anything alarming but went forward to inspect and found one of our 1" bridle lines had broken clean and the other had somehow come loose from its chain position, rendering it inoperable. We were simply banging back from the anchor chain alone. That was a testament to how hard the wind and waved action was pitching the boat around, as one couldn’t feel any difference from a working bridle and no bridle at all!

Rick had to do some shorthanded rework on the bridle set up by rigging a temporary new bridle line for the broken one from an old halyard line and reattached the one that come loose back onto the anchor chain. A pretty exciting half an hour for this old boy, but it got it done without an additional incident. After all of this excitement, Rick decided that maybe a new spot for the night might be prudent. A call the harbormaster to see if there were any available slips or mooring balls proved the right decision. The mooring balls were all taken but they had an available slip in the marina, so even though we hate marina life, we bit the bullet, for our guests comfort. After retrieving the girls from the beach, we then headed into the marina and a settled spot on the pier. After a quiet night on the dock, everyone spoke of a very good nights sleep and obviously, a much more pleasant night's rest. Now, however, we will likely have to do some slick talking to get them off the dock again and back out on the anchor when the wind finally subsides. We don’t want them to think that all sailing life is about rough weather and bumpy nights at anchor. In the meanwhile, beach time seems to satisfy their time in on the island.

More fun with the girls to come, when the weather turns normal in a couple of days. Stay tuned…

2 Guests leave, 1 Guest arrives.

We were finally able to leave Martinique to head across the passage to St. Lucia after hearing of 14-16 foot seas in that passage earlier in the week. Those high seas were the reason we opted to not deliver our recent guests, Steve and Lorraine, to the island of their upcoming departure back to the states. They opted for a ferry ride over which they said was not too bad but many of the passengers aboard the ferry would have likely disagreed. While we waited for a calmer passage, we were able to finish some of the needed work on our boat systems, primarily the battery concerns and elevating the exhaust hoses from our new mufflers. We knew of the energy issues since leaving the Virgins and the muffler situation was needed since flooding the one engine with sea water during an earlier, particularly rough passage. Our engine repairman had suggested replacing our new aftermarket mufflers with factory spec Volvo mufflers (at $500 each!) but suggested we make contact with their exhaust specialist, a technician in their Marin office, for further diagnosis and repair. Since we were fortunate to be in the boat fixing capital of the Caribbean at la Marin, Martinique so we knew we would have easy access to many quality technicians. We had made the appointment to meet with the muffler tech in Marin from the shop where they purged the seawater and saved the port engine. After his on-site review and diagnosis of tour exhaust system, he suggested that the mufflers we had should be fine, they just needed to be place further down on the floor of the engine compartment and added a long, elevated looped exhaust hose to help prevent seawater from backing into the engine again. Wow! Fixed with an extra couple hundred dollars of time and parts. What a relief! When we had our mufflers realigned in each engine compartment, we asked our mechanics for recommendations for electrical techs. He quickly offered a name and we contacted the fellow. Fortunately he spoke English and we made an appointment for him to come to the boat the next day. He was a younger man of maybe 35 but was obviously an expert in his field. He quickly set about examining and studying our electrical systems and reading the technical data from our technical specification documents. We found him quite amusing, as he would read the manuals commenting to himself in French as he read, almost to assure himself that he understood the English he was reading. He would then stop for a moment and stare into space contemplating what he had just read before resuming reading each manual. Once he completed his literary review, he undertook the physical challenge of following each wire and system to discover, then correct, each fault found therein. At one point we heard him from the salon, as he was working in the starboard engine compartment, say in beautifully French-accented English, “they just need to read the fooking BOOK!” We laughed and he replied that whoever had installed something electrical in that compartment had done so in error and if they had followed the instructions, all would have been fine. He completed his work in a couple of hours to proclaim the batteries as sufficient and good for the forseeable future and the charging system was now set up as it should have been originally. Another success! We were very happy campers!!! With the serious boat system concerns put to rest, we breathed a collective sigh of relief and made plans to head across to St. Lucia to pick up our next guest and long time Steamboat Springs friend, Jeannie Berger. The weather was good for the day before her scheduled arrival so we made the passage from Martinique to St. Lucia ahead of a developing weather front to pick her up in Rodney Bay. She flew into the airport at the extreme southern end of the island and Rodney Bay is on the northern tip. She made plans to take a taxi from the airport up to Rodney Bay to avoid us having to sail all the way to the other end of the island to get her. The hour and a half taxi ride also allowed her an opportunity to see the inland part of the island that boaters don’t get to experience. St. Lucia is a beautiful island with many high rugged mountains and majestic rain forests. She said she had a lovely trip from end to end with the taxi driver. We met her as the sun was setting at a local watering hole in Rodney Bay. We ordered a pizza and some drinks and welcomed her to the islands. Then back to the boat via dinghy and an early to bed night for us all. She had begun her travels 24 hours earlier, with a layover in Miami so she was really ready for bed and we were not to argue, as we were ready as well. The next morning, we listened to the weather guru give the news that the weather was thickening over then next several days so we decided that if we were going to get away from St. Lucia soon, that day was the best option for about the next week. We quickly prepared to get underway and headed out mid-morning across a rather bumpy and sea-sprayed passage back to Martinique. This was Jeannie’s first experience on our boat and she handled it very well through some rather difficult sea state conditions. 8-10’ waves and winds in the high teens gusting to 25. We made terrific time as the wind was coming from a good point of sail. We landed in Martinique around 4pm and were happy to be in a settled harbor, on the hook, enjoying boat drinks at sunset. So far we have been moving steadily along through the upper Windwards and landed yesterday at les Saintes, Guadeloupe. The weather has demanded that we keep moving and even suggested, at times, one might refer to sit it out for a couple of days. We knew the weather was just going to worsen so we opted to try to keep just ahead of the worst of it and so far, have done just that. We will now stay for a few days, at this beautiful area and let the weather catch up and pass us before we move on to another spot. We have had several high-speed sails in some pretty rough seas but all have faired well and the boat is performing like a young thoroughbred. A well deserved rest period is at hand!